Finding out wasn't always the product of fucking around. That first day of the Devouring Host's invasion wasn't the hardest. It had felt overwhelming, but Fiorenze would learn in a scant few days what overwhelming truly meant. Talon's Crew had gathered quickly and had fallen into a familiar cadence as the Void incursion was already underway on Quel'danas'. The creatures that had landed on those fair shores were uncanny to look at in a way that unsettled her deeply.
Her searing white astral magic that frissoned into prismatic colors at every edge complimented Tinnaire's fireballs. She and the other few druids in the group called down the stars to help push a safer perimeter for all their fighters. How bright they gleamed in that gloaming twilight. What an odd thing it was to fight back the falling night with the very thing that made it worth marveling at.
A gnarled, heavy and clawed hand that absorbed light raked down at her from her periphery and, on instinct, she swung her staff to bat it away. A golden sear marked the warped flesh and the beast recoiled with a howl. Fiorenze stilled for a moment before flipping the smooth wood in her hands so that she could rake the barbed edge down its chest, unmaking it better than her magic would have. It was odd that it had that reaction. She wished that she had a moment to stop, but that was a luxury here. She'd have to think on her feet.
Her staff had crafted it from the wood of her guardian tree, a great Eversong birch that had grown for ages on the land that raised her — shaped her. Since the rejuvenation of the Sunwell, the Light had started to permeate the very earth of her home. Small patches of luminous vegetation had taken root, and with decades the Dead Scar that marred the land had healed from the great font down to the Thalassian Gate.
The wood was infused. They could use the wood.
"TINNAIRE! Cover me!" she yelled loud enough to be heard over the din.
"What?!"
She didn't need to answer, she knew her friend would do what she asked immediately. She ducked under the trail of a fireball and ran as fast as she could to Nuna Birdsong, a Tauren druid among the Crew's number, "The WOOD."
Nuna hurled a coalesced sphere of nature magic that hummed with wrath in the direction of a voidling and looked at her with some incredulity, "What??"
"The trees here are infused with the Light, we can use the wood if we ask politely," she held up her staff and the glimmering golden leaves that hung from the curled crook shined in the low light.
"Oh. Oh!" Nuna clapped a large hand on her shoulder, "I'll tell the others. Find the trees that are safe, we'll do the same. I'll let the Commander know when there's a good moment." Her smile let Fio know there probably wouldn't be one, but the spirit was there.
Fiorenze nodded and shifted into a star-bright white kestrel, swift enough to bank around danger and small enough avoid most hazards, and rocketed across the field to the nearest tree that was surrounded by more friends than foe. Her form changed back to that of an elf mid-flight, her feet hitting the ground with a mere yard to run to her destination. She pressed both of her hands to the sun warmed bark and called upon her training and innate gifts with plants to beseech the boughs for a blessing.
With a friendly creak and a few loud cracks that were lost in the roar of battle, a few older branches crashed to the ground around her and she smiled brightly among the greater wreck of her people's holy island. It didn't take long for her to holster her own staff across her back and scoop up the thick branches in her arms. Running them back to camp was another matter entirely, but she managed it.
Sheizara stared at her with an equal level of incredulity as Nuna as she dropped all the branches in the supply area. Fiorenze immediately dropped to her knees and began using as much of her magic as she could to draw the water out in order to fake some kind of aging, "This is the best I can do, I know the wood is green, but if this can be made into arrows it is infused with the Light."
Her sister-in-law blinked a couple of times and looked at her own arrows, made from the wood of Eversong trees and smiled massively in her own brilliant, ditzy way, "Cool. GARREN!" Shei grabbed one of the branches and hauled it over to him, "Want to be hot with me and make some fancy shit?"
Under the cover of the Voidstorm, it was hard to tell how much time had passed. When she was encouraged to rest, she helped shape some of the heavier boughs into crude staves and clubs for their fighters to use while Sheizara and Garren made arrows for their archers.
It hadn't passed under her notice the looks Xylaes was being thrown. How he stayed at the fringes. Her heart hurt; it wasn't his fault. It hadn't been his choice to have an arm that had some void ability attached to his body. She'd loved him then. Maybe she still did, in a way, even now. Not that there was any time to dwell on that.
Nor was there really any time to dwell on the way her mood lifted when Dicenne joined the field. He never hesitated to throw himself into the fray, and there was no way she was going to hesitate throwing her blessing of the wild on him now. Not after K'aresh. It gave him a boost, it helped keep him safe. His sister Kara lived in the city, and he was fighting for her as much as — maybe more than — Quel'thalas itself. Fiorenze understood that; her own sister was here on the isle and sequestered away in the Magister's Terrace. She could check in on him later, if there was a later.
The hours drew on.
It was hard to actually sleep. The churn of upsetting sound was a constant thrum, when she stopped moving the dread seized her, and the smell of scoured earth mixed with blood and that funny smell the void always carried with it — hot metal mixed with tinny ozone — was overpowering. More and more in the Crew were being held back due to injury. She had, at one point, rolled her ankle terribly and had an ear gashed to the degree that she'd lost one of her helix piercings in a scuffle with a voidwalker. Trivial, compared to some.
She hadn't been doing this as long as some of the others, but there was a palpable concern settling in. At some point the Devouring Host would overwhelm them the way a King's tide overflowed eroded sand breaks.
When that happened, she hoped it was a quick end.
Exhaustion had set in, and with it something strange and new began. The first sprite darter to appear at her side to help had startled her. It faded away within moments, and another one phased in shortly after. Then a dryad from the Dream. The occasional treant, too. Somehow, the space around her was starting to fray at the edges and that was letting the Emerald fog leak into reality.
Everything hurt. It was getting harder and harder to push, but she'd found a new limit and had broken past it time and time again over the last few days. Eventually there would be a ceiling.
She heard the gasps of shock before she registered what was happening. All at once the Light called its champions to the Sunwell and in a flash of pale gold they all answered — leaving the Crew severely short staffed. The majority of the members were former Argents, and their summons made many significant gaps in their established defenses.
"FALL BACK!"
It was the only call Talon could make. She kept back a small wave of miniature voidlings with a well timed starfall to aid those that were helping the wounded as much as they could. The waves of shooting stars were enough to provide some cover. This was it, but there was no way she was going fucking quietly into that tumultuous night, and the mood among the rest of the Crew seemed to be the same.
The Devouring Host pushed the issue. Fresh waves of attacks harried their group for hours, and she could hear the anguished cries of others faring far worse in the near distance with each hot press the enemy advanced against them all. A swarm of violent void jellyfish started to dive for them and she raised her shaking, battle-worn hands to do what she could… and they froze where they were.
A sickly glow suddenly consumed them, glowing ever brighter as the Light ripped them — and every other void beast — asunder.
She laughed. It sounded pathetic and weak to her own hears. Incredulous. Perhaps it was for the best that the rushing torrent of sound that cascaded out from the column of magic that had shot up from the Sunwell itself to push back against the Voidstorm masked it for her.
They'd done it. They'd DONE it. She turned to see who was there to share in that manic exasperated exaltation and Xylaes was there by her side. Too tired to smile, too wrung out to think of anything beyond simply having survived, their gazes connected — his an eclipsed, vibrant violet and her own an arcane blue, both so different from the first time they had ever looked at each other at a bustling market in the Court of the Sun. The brief squeeze he gave her hand meant everything. Part of her wanted to chase the contact and hook their pinkies together, but that was a sliver of a different woman who always took more than had been granted.
Sometimes it was better to let go.
Her staff thrummed in her hand as the wave of Light rolled beyond the isle and through Eversong; something was wrong. Everyone looked toward the Sunwell, but her gaze turned toward the wood. The balance had shifted, and that wouldn't be easy to fix.
@themercenaries / @kharrisdawndancer (tinnaire), @garrennorassin, @xylaes, @dicenne, @talonoa
